Letters from Rachel 1

As my previous featured correspondent seems to have dropped off writing to me ever since I started posting her emails (with permission!), I thought I'd make a switch. It often occurs to me that those who write in showering me with praise are way more deserving of it than me...

You can find Rachel here. (The photograph is of the wonderful 90s US band, Madder Rose - minus, sadly, the totally ace Matt Verta-Ray.)

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It's so clear you are someone whose soul eats music to survive - or, just when suffering from a soul ache, fears it just like someone with a stomach bug has no desire to eat - in fact, is scared to eat for fear of regurgitation, or it making you feel worse for a longer period of time than starvation. At least when one doesn't imbibe, they know what to expect. Unpredictability isn't really what depressives are searching for....it's requires much too much faith in life.

I'm the same way - whilst in a depression for 18 months between 2007 and 09, I rarely if ever listened to music. I couldn't go there. My kid - now 8 but a real music nutter since the age of three when he memorized every Beatles track in order, from track one of With the Beatles straight thru to "and in the end...." on Abbey Road - had to listen to music in his room, I couldn't risk hearing anything that would make me feel. I certainly didn't anticipate feeling anything positive and didn't want to open the floodgates of emotion, so I turned to reading. Reading silently and writing silently day after day. One of my more benign forms of escapism, I admit.

I don't really think of you as a music "critic" because that word, to me, conjures images of columns so serious in their attempt at objective analysis it's tedious to read. Something explainable by number of stars... What the fuck, it's not a blood pressure test. Quantifiable emotions? No, others bury their emotional response behind prose better suited for the New England Journal of Medicine. Music as science, dissected via analytical reasoning.

If music were sex, your writing is what you'd write to your lover, (not to allude too strongly to that original Hole review) and what is in Rolling Stone would be, say, Masters and Johnson, That's why I can remember names of bands I never actually heard like Madder Rose or Dan Treacy's Television Personalities....your writing is not just passionate, it's sexy. Hence I see you as a music lover who writes about his love. Not a critic. It'd be great if you could just call yourself a Music Lover or Music Fanatic... but I suppose editors wouldn't go for that. So critic it is.

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My song of the day on my FB page that no one gives a shit about except me is Dando's "Frying Pan" from that Sweet Relief album...in preparation for the show at Maxwell's in a couple weeks. Yesterday was Jeff Buckley, "Grace" (the song) and before that "15 Steps" by Radiohead. I can't remember anything before this week...I'm a 38 year old single mother, who can recall a song from Saturday?